Who’s your favourite mother in fiction? Novelists pick theirs for Mother’s Day

Happy Mother’s Day! As mums and mother figures are celebrated and remembered across the UK today, I’ve asked a selection of novelists to pick their favourite ones from fiction. And Detransition, Baby author Torrey Peters, whose new novel has just come out, shares the books she’s loved lately. That’s all after this week’s highlights.

“In fiction, mothers tend to fall into the categories of good and bad, saintly and monstrous,” says Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies and the forthcoming Audition. If you’re looking for something less one-dimensional, she suggests reading Japanese writer Yūko Tsushima’s Territory of Light, “one of the best depictions of motherhood I have read, capturing its contradictions and sublime banality”. The single parent in the story “is neither a good nor bad mother, she simply is”.

Poet and novelist Seán Hewitt picks a single mum too: Avril Win, from Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings. “What I love about her is the way her tenderness for her son throughout his life is slowly accommodated into her love for her new partner, Esme,” he says. “Avril, in her gentle guidance and concern, her protectiveness and warmth, changes through new awarenesses of sexuality and class. There are tensions, but never ruptures. Between mother and son, there is a beautiful, elegant dance of a relationship, a slow, steadily unfolding and persevering love.”

Meanwhile Kit de Waal loves a “beautiful if conflicted” adoptive mother: Hortense Roberts in Small Island by Andrea Levy. Hortense, a Black woman in postwar England, discovers her husband has fathered a child with a white woman, Queenie, and agrees to raise the child as her own. “It’s not only an act of kindness but a way for Hortense to address her own adoption,” says the novelist and chair of judges for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction.

“The fictional mother I am madly in love with right now is Ruth in Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed,” says Catherine Newman, the author of Sandwich and We All Want Impossible Things.

The character “is mothering a person struggling with addiction and also raising that person’s little daughter,” she says. “The way Ruth expresses the life-lived-in-moments quality of raising a child, alongside the agony of connection and the looming loss and also the tiniest pleasure of a teacup with a bit of apricot jam for eating with a spoon – it is so tender and complicated and human.”

For Gurnaik Johal, one of the Observer’s best new novelists for 2025, Clodagh, the narrator of Joseph O’Neill’s short story Rainbows, is the mother character he thinks about often, “as if she were someone I’d actually met,” he says.

When her daughter is harassed by another student at school who is from a lower social standing, Clodagh “tries and fails to do good by all parties involved,” Johal says. “The story is very specific to New York in the late 2010s/early 2020s, while covering an experience of motherhood that could easily translate to different times and places. Like many O’Neill characters, Clodagh is particular, endearing and quotable.”

Joelle Taylor’s choice is the “fierce, textured, conflicted, and complicated” character of Offred in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, “a small woman guarding her child, standing up to the might and ignorance of Gilead, whether she wins or not”.

She makes “a refreshing counter to traditional literary stereotypes of the passive mother,” the poet and novelist says.

Vaseem Khan also loves a “fierce” mother character: Cersei Lannister from George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones.

She “may be a murderer, a tyrant, a backstabber, an adulterer and an incestuous femme fatale with a penchant for torturing people she doesn’t get on with,” the crime writer admits. “But she’s also a pretty good mother. To her own kids. Sod everyone else’s. They can burn.”

Even though it came out only last year, I was so impressed with Alvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empiresthat I am on my second reread. As all around me institutions fall and norms fail, I feel the moment requires audacious re-imaginings of history or possibilities of thought, and on both a political and imaginative level, Enrique delivers with his wild telling of the meeting between Hernán Cortés and Moctezuma.

I’d be remiss not to shout out the Australian essayist Vivian Blaxell’s sharp and amusingly tart new collection Worthy of the Event. These essays span years – the book seems to contain a whole library of experience.

Lastly, my entire relationship to plants has been altered, rather shockingly, by having read The Light Eatersby Zoë Schlanger, which explores the possibility of plant intelligence, plant behaviour and even plant consciousness. Just sitting in a back yard, surrounded by plants, became a visitation with other beings – a truly life-expanding book.

• Stag Dance by Torrey Peters is published by Serpent’s Tail (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.